A splendid WIC office

A PLANNED NEWOFFICE FOR THE FIVE SANDOVAL INDIAN PUEBLOS’Women, Infants and Children (WIC) food and nutrition program recently won a Citation Award fromthe Santa Fe chapter of theAmerican Institute of Architects. “This was a very complicated project, probably one reason why it’s not built,” James Horn of Spears Horn Architects told the AIA awards crowd at La Posada on Dec. 14. The facility he designed for a site on Santa Ana Pueblo includes a demonstration kitchen and facilities for nutrition and diet training, family counseling, maternal/ infant options, and physical exams. “I was involved in this in 2015 and 2016, working pretty closely with Karen Griego-Kite, director of theWIC Program at Five Sandoval Indian Pueblos,” Horn said. “The client from the beginning wanted an inner courtyard. It’s a glazed inner courtyard that emphasizes the site lines so when Karen’s in her office she can see all the way to the reception desk and everybody gets natural light, another nice part of it.”

The interior has burnished concrete floors, walls with reclaimed-fir and blackboard-paint details, and ceilings of birch-face plywood. The exteriors are stucco, but the building has neat design features including a pleasing variety of masses, a glassy waiting room, and an entry/patio “L” between the main building and kitchen, which has a distinctive elevated roof. “That opens all the way back and you get a view to the Sandia Mountains,” Horn said. “And we have a sitting area. We worked hard to create different sitting areas for people coming to get services.” In the plans, that waiting room has a sunken play area and a window looking out to the entryway.

Steel framing would be used for the offices, but the kitchen walls would be insulated concrete forms “to make it more massive and prominent,” the architect told Home. “The idea withWIC is that they have a demonstration kitchen so people in the community can come in for cooking methods and good nutrition and also examination rooms and blood testing and there’s a breast pump distribution center, too. The kitchen building also has a conference area and that building can be leased on the weekends, with the offices closed off.”

Matt Johnson commented that he and the other award jurors “were interested in the social agenda of this project, as well as its reinterpretation of a vernacular type into a more modern structure. Compared to nearby mixed-use developments, theWIC maintains a nice sense of scale and materiality.”— PaulWeideman